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"This is the past, and the past is in black and white. Get it?"
Ever since black and white photography, the past has been depicted as in black and white, sepia tone, or muted colors. Usually invoked for a Flashback. Sometimes made fun of by claiming that the real world was, in fact, black and white prior to the invention of color.
Subtrope of Flashback Effects. See also Deliberately Monochrome, for when the entire work is this way.
Examples
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Advertising
- A Geico commercial, presenting the scenario of Abraham Lincoln's wife asking him whether a dress makes her look fat, was done in heavy sepia with conspicuous film grain, as though it were filmed in the 1930s.
Anime & Manga
- Done in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood during one Scar's flashbacks. They mix it with Splash of Color to contrast both the blue eyes of the Amestrian Soldiers invading Ishval and Winry's parents with the red eyes of the Ishvallans and Envy in disguise, just before he shoots the young girl to start the war.
- Most of the flashbacks in Season 1 of Tower of God are various shades of sepia and brown.
Comic Strips
- In one Sunday Strip of Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin asks his dad why old photos are in black and white, and Dad explains that the world used to be in black and white. As to why the photos didn't turn to color with everything else, Dad explains that they're color photos of a black-and-white world.
Fan Works
Films — Live-Action
Live-Action TV
Video Games
- Flashbacks from the Pensieve in the Harry Potter video games are like this.
- The hero's recovered memories in Sanitarium are shown as either black-and-white or sepia-toned grainy-textured films.
- Weirdly inverted in Vagrant Story. Most of the game takes place in a Deliberately Monochrome setting (mostly brown). When Ashley flashes back to his past, he sees a gorgeous blue sky and a green grassy hill.
- Parodied in one of the vaults in Fallout 3.
- Plok has a dream flashback where you play as Grand Pappy Plok, with monochrome graphics and silent film-style text and piano music.
- The flashback sequences in XIII are monochrome.
- In Super Smash Bros Brawl, flashbacks in the Adventure mode cutscenes are black and white.
- Flashbacks in Chibi-Robo are in sepia. Additionally, when the titular robot and his sidekick go back in time, everything is sepia except for them. Lampshaded by the sidekick, who says that they must be in the past since everything's all sepia.
Visual Novels
- Flashbacks in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney always do this (except in cases 1-4 of the first game). The one in case 3-4 is even shown with lines running down it like errors on an old film reel. The fifth case is different because it was not in the original release of the first game.
- Shiki's memories in Tsukihime are often in black and white; in one case to deliberately hide the fact that the girl in the window was Kohaku and the girl that was outside was Hisui; twins other than their eye color.
Web Animation
Web Comics
Western Animation
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